This week I had an e-mail from someone who was frustrated with how it had become so slow to scroll through one of his Microsoft Word documents. I immediately asked if there were a lot of images in it, and he replied to say that it was absolutely full of high-resolution pictures.

If you've ever worked with an image-heavy document, you might have experienced this problem with slow scrolling. The good news is that you can speed it up again if you're willing to temporarily make all of those images invisible.

Go to the 'File' tab, and then choose 'Options'. From the options on the left-hand side of the window that pops up, choose 'Advanced'. Now scroll down to the 'Show document content' section, and place a checkmark next to 'Show picture placeholders'. When you're done, press the 'OK' button.

By choosing this option, you're letting Word show empty boxes instead of loading every single image. You should find that scrolling is no longer quite as painful.

Unfortunately, there is one catch: this will only work for images that have the wrapping set to 'In Line with Text'. If the wrapping is any other kind, setting the placeholder option will not have any effect.